Video – Michelle Alexander – Locked out of the American Dream

Everything Michelle Alexander is saying is what I have been writing about and for quite some time. Understanding this when it is too late won’t help anyone. How many more children have to lose one or both of their parents to a system they can’t fight against because there are men who are much stronger who can make a profit out of selling them? How many of you have lost someone to the system? American dream? Is there an American dream for most people? This America – Land of the Brave – Home of the Free – ceased to exist a long time ago yet the rhetoric is still being fed and it is still being believed.

It isn’t just the prisons, it is any way they can convince you to give up your life or the life of your loved one for a cause that only exists for profit. Join the armed service and fight for the freedom of America is really – fight the war of the corporations in the countries that have something we want and wrap it up in patriotism. Our men and women think they are fighting for one reason – but it isn’t the real reason. We are being used. Our families are being torn apart. We are expendable. And as president Bush Sr once said ( off camera), he considered each American to be equal to one fodder unit. Do you know what a fodder unit is? Our men and women in prison are also fodder.

The corporations that own the prisons get paid for every person they incarcerate. This is why their 20 year contracts state that the prisons they take over have to be kept 90% and sometimes 100% full at all times or we, the taxpayers have to pay these corporations for their loss of money to make up for what they aren’t getting.

So how can our prison populations go down when the people with money are fighting in the opposite direction? This is our country and we need to fight for it. Right now we are not only losing, we are fighting among ourselves – just what they want us to do.

This blog is about a man you should be familiar with by now – Jamie Cummings – the black father of one of my grandsons, with a white mother, my daughter. My grandsons are black – not white. It is easy for a white person to say they aren’t racist until they come face to face with it and it affects their own family. It is easy for white people to glance at the situation and turn their face away and go on with their lives because they think it doesn’t affect them. Many people turn a blind eye and pretend it isn’t there because they don’t want to get involved.

Have you ever had a cause? Something you believed in so strongly it permeated through your bone marrow? Something that at the end of your life, defined who you are? How you will be remembered? If someone where to describe who you were and finished the sentence, (your name), believed in (something) and (did something) that affected the lives of . . .Not for recognition but because your life affected other people in a positive way. After I had a liver transplant in 2012, I wanted my life to mean something. I didn’t want to waste it. I didn’t want to waste these extra years of life I was given. These are my thoughts for me, not meant to disparage anyone else. We all make our own choices. This is when I started this blog.

This issue affects everyone and it continues to slide the power more and more into the wealthy hands of wealthy men who think they have the right to profit off the sales of human beings they decide have no value. It is a sophisticated and ALLOWED form of slavery. Allowed because we don’t pay attention. Allowed because too many people believe the hype that prisons are only for locking up bad people. Unless you take the time to to take notice, it just slides by you because you think it has nothing to do with your life. I recently watched a video where a man was auctioning off a brand new prison – in auctioneer vernacular – to the highest bidder promising them there was an endless stream of new prisoners and they’d make lots of money on the sale of these people they decided are beneath them and they should have the right to profit from them.

I have studied and researched this issue to the point that if it were possible to have a degree in this – I would have at least a masters. But what to do with this information? How do I make a difference with this knowledge? I am very concerned for my grandsons, now ages 6 and 8 because I know what is coming for them and i want to be able to protect them. I know the possibilities that await them and it scares the daylights out of me. I know now, what every other person of color has now for a long time. I apologize to them for taking so long to join the fight.

I was never aware before of the prison system and what it stood for. I only knew what you know. I never thought of myself as a racist. It is easy to think you aren’t racist if you are white because it doesn’t affect your immediate life. But we are programmed to be racist. In speaking with a woman who said strongly that she isn’t racist, still said, without thinking, that if a black boy came toward her with a hooded sweatshirt she would be suspicious. Why? I asked. She had no answer other than she couldn’t see his face. We are programmed to think that a black person wearing a hooded sweatshirt is someone who is up to no good and might hurt us. There is a an earlier blog post, a letter from Jamie, Walking While Black that is worth reading if you haven’t already.

After I started this blog, posting Jamie’s letters, and after starting the book, “Inside the Forbidden Outside”, I realized absolutely that I had a cause and that cause is probably the most important thing I will have done in my life. There are other prison blogs and prison books written by inmates, and many of them are about how bad they were as criminals and all the horrible things they do to each other in prison. Some have been able to change their lives in positive ways and some want to help influence the young people to keep them out of prison.

This book I am writing is about the person. The heart. The mental anguish of loneliness, separation from family, Loss of dignity and indignities shown, humiliation of being treated as less than a person. I want this book to be able helping to change what is happening. I want more people to stand up and say it needs to be changed. So much of all the bad things our government is doing that makes our life harder are things that we have allowed to happen. We listen to the hype. We pass bad information as if it were truth. We listen to sound bites and believe them.

I know what is waiting for Jamie when he gets out of prison. Not only will it be hard to get his life together, it will be next to impossible unless my voice is loud enough to help change it for him. Where does the money come from for him to have a place to live when no one will give him a job? Will he have to depend on a family who hasn’t even given him $10 to buy the stamps he needs to write letters they never answer? All he wants is to be a father. He was pushed through the school to prison pipeline from the age of 16 and he’s 32 now. My hope is that writing his story, also about the injustice and racism in the prisons with horrible living conditions will sell to help bring him enough income to help get his life together.. He is a special person. A man with heart and hopes and dreams just like everyone else and I want him to be able to help him be that man. There will bee a second book. This one is the inside of prison. The second book will be about what happens on the outside.

Life after prison. I see the possibility of lectures, of him speaking at schools and communities and finding a way to turn a negative into a positive. I see this so clearly in my mind. Without this support he will not know which way to turn or what to do because he doesn’t have the wisdom gained by life experience. He is not a “criminal”. He is, unfortunately black and has not one skill to depend on. The prison system has kept him so far down he hasn’t even been able to study for his GED. Even McDonalds wouldn’t hire him because he will be an ex-felon. Also having epilepsy is a major setback. He came into my life for a reason and this is the reason why I do what I do. This is my cause and the reason for my day. It is what I am meant to do. What will be his life after prison?

There is something I have told many people. “The only legacy of value we can leave behind when we die, is the affect we have on other people.” It is how we live on. I want to be part of this change. My problem – I don’t know where to take it from here. I don’t know the right people. Where and how do I begin speaking out? I have spoken in different circumstances in front of a hundreds of people. Being able to speak is not an issue. How does one get more involved? You may not have those answers but I have to keep pushing ahead in any way I can to find them.

Thank you for watching. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read anything of this blog yet. The opening page “I want yo encourage you . . .” tells you how to begin. Is about a man, Jamie Cummings, who is caught in our prison system along with many others who has often been kept in holiday confinement, unable to even study for his GED when he eventually gets paroled how is he supposed to live? He’s not. The easiest way to keep prisons full is to keep them coming back in through the back door. I’m writing a book to hopefully help him. I need all the help I can get. I started a facebook page excerpts of the book chapters http://facebook.com/insidetheforbiddenoutside ( his regular facebook page you can get to right here on this blog. It has his blog posts and many other articles. If you don’t do fb there is blog I just started for the same thing http://insidetheforbiddenoutside.wordpress.com. If you would share this with your sm it will help me get this story out. He is sitting in solitary confinement again for another year -again. This makes 5. i hope to talk to you again. Thanks.

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This has been a year of writing music - which can be found on either of my blogs, mynameisjamie.net and watchandwhirl.com. and at the website soundcloud.com/sonni-quick. This has also been a year of writing and learning how to write - the book I am writing "Inside The Forbidden Outside" , the story of Jamie Cummings and his life from juvenile detention to prison. I also publish a monthly newsletter - ITFO - on happenings inside the prison industry. There are ways to subscribe on the blog and at facebook at jamielifeinprison